With all those houses, I've not painted very many miniatures this month... and I did receive more than a hundred additional miniatures from Victrix, Perry and the Talisman game. As a result, I have decided to paint as many as I can before tomorrow. To begin with, I've finished the Victrix... see you in the evening!

Hopefully, my wife is working tonight and we have no party scheduled! [Ed: 4.5 hours of News Year's party hell, is looming for me. :-( ]

Armies of the Sixteenth century T2 : The armies of the Aztec and Incan Empires, other native peoples of the Americas, and Conquistadores 1450-1608 (long title...): It should give me some motivation to paint all those conquistadores and south americans that have been waiting for a pretty long time, half painted !

Impérial Armour Model Masterclass volume One (ok, they'll waant to sell me Volume 2 I guess...). This one is to help me start painting the 24, yes 24 Imperial Guard tanks that have been waiting (undercoated) for one or two years: PKP has seen them... big red bat too, if I'm right [Ed; I only saw your painted ones].

And finally : Armies of the 20th Century Risings and Rebellions 1919 to 1939. For this one, I have no miniatures beside the Innsmouth ones, perhaps. I do hope that it won't make me buy more miniatures... [Ed: there are the Muskateer Fenians...]

OK, after reading so much good review of Okko, I've finally bought it (yep, it's not a Christmas gift). Also the revised 4th edition of Talisman in French (I already had the 4th English one, not revised). OK, the gameplay is crappy by today's standards, but it's all about nostalgia and my first contacts with the game back in the 1984-5! If you don't know the game (ie if you don't have the nostalgia factor) and if you're not looking for a fantasy game to play with 10 or 11 years old childrens, just try another game.

I nearly forgot... Innsmouth. I've made some good progress. I've "filled" all the roofs, and I've started to detail the houses. When this is completed, the final steps will be to texture the ground and to paint. For the moment, I'm doing the minimum, as my objective is to have a playable game as soon as possible. When this is ready, I'll have plenty of time left to add more details. The letters refer to the map. So here they are :

Le temple de l'ordre ésotérique de Dagon (G) :The temple of the esoteric order of Dagon (G) :

I am finally done with those roofs... oops, I was forgeting the bridges! Well, I'm close to being done. As a consequence, I am now working on doors and windows. After a complete failure with a cheap resin (very toxic and fragile), I am going to use bits of stirrer-like wood and balsa and whatever I will find useful. I am mostly going to make shutters, generally closed. Doors will be in balsa.

A new task means a new little map. As I'm working in a hurry, I am going to stick with the little map in the upper right hand corner instead of posting every time I'm making any progress, as I first did with the roofs.

I am safe; after a close examination of both of my hands, I still have 9 fingers. Besides this, I'm doing a lot of different things at the same time; cleaning the flash from the Perry miniatures, some bits of painting on the Victrix, and covering the already made Innsmouth roofs with a mix of filler/PVA glue and acrylic paint to reinforce and texture them. I'm also making doors for Innsmouth's houses, conducting some tests with resin (which was smelling bad and not working well) and roofing a new block:

On the other hand, I want to work intensively until Monday and as a consequence, I am going to try to not post on this blog: I will just update the Innsmouth map in the upper right corner each time I Make a making roof. You will have to wait until Monday evening for the pictures.

Bonnes fêtes à ceux qui aiment les fêtes, bon courage aux autres.

I wish happy celebrations to those who enjoy celebrations and a lot of courage to the rest.

lundi 22 décembre 2008

Les frères Perry devaient m'envoyer un échantillon de leur dernière boite. Je ne sais pas si c'est parce qu'ils sont deux, parce qu'ils m'aiment bien ou parce qu'ils veulent m'acheter (ou qu'ils veulent voir des figurines en cour de peinture pendant très longtemps... malin !), mais j'ai reçu deux exemplaires de leur boite d'infanterie de ligne française, soit pas moins de 84 figurines à peindre (toutes les quantités qui suivent sont données pour une seule boite). Je n'ai presque plus de rouge, il faudra aussi acheter du bleu !The Perry brothers have been kind enough to send me a sample of their most recent release. I'm not sure why they have sent me two; whether it's because they love me a lot, or because they want me to buy some (or whether they just want to see their figures being painted over an extremely long period of time). I've received two samples of their box of French Line Infantry, no less than 84 miniatures to paint (all the quantities that follow are given for a single box)! I won't need any more red; now I'll need to buy some blue!

Les boites sont plus petites que les Victrix (10 figurines de moins que chez Victrix, mais la boite est 3 fois plus petite) et n'ont pas été "rentabilisées" comme les Victrix. Au dos, des illustrations reprises de la plaquette intérieure:The boxes are smaller than Victrix (10 figures less than Victrix, but the box is only a third of the size), and has not been used as potential gaming material like the Victrix box. On the back of the box, there are illustrations, which are a copy of the interior ones :

Bon, vu que la boite n'est pas passionnante, voyons l'intérieur :

So, if the box itself doesn't thrill you, let's have a look at what's inside:

3 sprues of miniatures including a command one, an instruction sheet and a sprue of bases. This latter is probably useful for the rules systems for which they are compatible. I personally don't play Napoleonics, so I'm not in a position to say whether these sizes are a good choice. I have decided to base my British individually, and will do the same for the French; I may use the bases provided for a different game.

Good, they are mainly soldiers in a marching pose. From my limited experience with Victrix, I see this as an advantage, because it should be easier and quicker to paint them. On the other hand, the variety of the Victrix poses lends that range to skirmish, for which I intend to use them with (Song of drums and shakos). In summary, the Perrys look better to paint, and would look excellent in big armies where the rest of the miniatures are marching. After having painted 52 Victrix troops packed with detail in a variety of poses, it will be a pleasure to speed paint these marching minis. There are also six tirailleurs in more dynamic poses.

Coming to the instructions which describes how to paint the figures as French or Swiss (with their red jackets, where I've already been). Therefore the Victrix box represents a single type of soldier, whereas the Perry box represents a battalion composed of 6 companies (4 of fusiliers, one of grenadiers and one of voltigeurs represented twice, once marching and once firing). All this is explained in the instructions. It seems to me also that there is more information on the uniforms than in the Victric box (we'll return to this in the final grand comparison). Two flags are included, those of the 19th and the 55th line regiments.

The insert on which the flags are printed seems less detailed than that of Victrix and could therefore be a source of future problems. I'll come back to this later... No rules are included except for brief list of the rules played by the Perry brothers.

Over the past few days, I've been working on this little movie which will be used as a trailer for my next participation game. I have created Innsmouth for Tentacles OMEGA, and it is also headed for Salute 2009 and the other conventions I'll visit this year, if it is ready (if not I'll show The Block, my previous game). :

(what follow is shorter than the french text, but you'll get the gist :) Beside this, I've bought a new carrying case for my miniatures and scenery, which will replace the Ford Galaxy whose gearbox has failed after only 110 000km. Ford's client services were exceptionally invisible and absent, until I was just about to sell the Galaxy and buy a Chrysler instead: at this moment, they called to argue (aggresively) about my unfair choice, which helped me to choose Chrysler. The Ford car dealers I'd contacted didn't called back, proving that Ford is absolutely not trying to sell its way out of the crisis. This is not off-topic, because the main reason I buy a big car is to carry big terrain pieces... and I know it's a shame.

I'm not sure that I'll be able to do more this evening, but who knows, there may be another post. Whatever; this is the orc team I have painted over the last few days. The French-language explanation of the colors I used, is mainly there to make fun of (and eventually with) Dragon Tigre who inspired those painting sessions.

I'm sick. I've spent most of the weekend sleeping, and the weekend finally ended yesterday evening. This morning, I've managed to get back to my work (the one which let me earn my living, not my painting table), but this evening, I'm still not feeling very well. That means no production. Beside the Blood Bowl orcs, that I started paintingas when I was suffering from a fever, may end with a very 80's look.

Apart from this, on Wednesday I should buy a new big carrying box : I'll tell more when I have it.

Last minute newsflash: I received 2 boxes from the Perry brother's that I'll try to show you tomorow evening. That means that I'm now in a hurry to finish the Victrix! Then I'll start a step-by-step painting guide with those Frenchies, and, as a grand finale, a comparative review of the 2 products.

About the picture, I stay in the Napoleonic theme with an archive picture of some "miniatures" (tokens?) from one of the various editions of the RISK boardgame which was built as a HoTT army...The house/camp is made of Milliput.

After a long discussion with myself in the shower, we've decided that the separate posts for Innsmouth and Victrix were just too boring to produce, and that it just wasn't worth the effort. So, from now, just one post at a time.

I've spent a lot of time looking at Dragon Tigre 's plastic miniatures he's painted recently, trying to figure what I would have done differently if I was him, and finally I decided to paint my own. As a direct consequence, Dragon Tigre is following Walktapus in the "Mechants" (= evil ones) list because it's obviously his fault if I'm late in my other projects after spending some time converting those orcs from the BB boxed set (don't ask which edition) :

PS : Dragon Tigre spent time and techniques to differentiate all the miniatures by the use of diferent colors. This was subtle. I'm not subtle, so that's just another way, neither better, nor worse. This is all about emulating each other.

2 more blocks tackled. Besides this, I've been looking at the cars I painted yesterday. They are ugly, and not in the way I would like them to be ugly. So I'll have to redo them. Maybe this weekend... wait and see.

This has been a good night for the British! I've made enough progress to actually think that they'll be finished, soon. When they are, I'll try to review all the pros and cons of the range. A characteristic that enters both categories is the amount of detail; there really is a great deal of fine detail. As a result, you have to paint all the details. And that takes a very long time. It's also due to the period.

Whilst I won't say that I'll never paint Napoleonic again (I have some incoming on the production line), I can't imagine myself painting huge Napoleonic armies.